ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents the group exhibition encouraging audiences to look beyond the binary framework of much political rhetoric, The Revolution Will Not be Gray, featuring the work of internationally recognized artists Andrea Bowers, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Claire Fontaine, Sharon Hayes, Iman Issa, Tony Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Carlos Motta, Adam Pendleton, Pedro Reyes, and Carey Young. The Revolution will not be Gray includes fifteen works in a range of approaches and media (painting, drawing, sculpture, moving image and sound) to examine the provocative, historically charged, and often-contradictory nature of language in relation to the political. Curated by AAM Curator Courtenay Finn, The Revolution will not be Gray will remain on view in AAM Galleries 5 and 6 through October 16, 2017.
The timely exhibition takes its title from a 1979 speech by writer and former Nicaraguan Vice President Sergio Ramírez in which he affirmed the all-too-common impulse to relegate to or render political events in strictly black-and-white terms. Importantly, the works within The Revolution Will Not Be Gray remind us of the power inherent not only in harnessing one’s own voice, but of the potency that comes from the act of listening.
In her exhibition guide essay curator Finn comments: “In the field of ethics, gray is used in two ways: pejoratively, to describe uncertain situations that lack clear moral standing; and positively, to address complexity and to counterbalance an all-black or all-white view.”
Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Often straddling the line between activism and art, Bowers’s practice spans a variety of media including, video, drawing, and installation-based works. Bowers was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2009, and her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the globe, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Her work was featured at the AAM within the exhibition The Residue of Memory in 2012.
Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City) is a conceptual artist known for his incorporation of found objects and his ongoing “autoconstrucción” works first begun in 2007. His work has been exhibited globally and is featured in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern in London, as well as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), among others.
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based art collective founded in 2004 that takes ‘her’ name from a popular brand of French school notebooks. Functioning as a “readymade” artist, Claire Fontaine’s productions openly engage in a critique of both art and the art market, and, "interrogate the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.” Claire Fontaine’s first U.S. museum exhibition, After Marx April After Mao June, was presented at the Aspen Art Museum beginning December 10, 2009.
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) is a New York-based multimedia artist and activist working in video, performance and installation art. Her work has been shown at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Tate Modern in London, Museum Moderner Kunst and the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, as well as being included the 2010 Whitney Biennial, among many other exhibitions.
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo, Egypt) is based in Cairo and New York. Recent group and solo exhibitions include the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Sculpture Center, New York, and the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo. Issa teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles) lives and works in Chicago. His recent exhibitions include The Studio Museum, New York, as well as solo exhibitions at Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. His work was presented in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, New York) is a conceptual artist whose wide-ranging works focus on numerous issues surrounding identity including race and sexuality, as well as his interests in both literature and language through the use of numerous media. Perhaps best known for his post-2005 works in neon and as a proponent of a movement which he helped term “Post-Blackness,” Ligon's work is represented in many important public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Tate Modern, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.
Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Bogotá, Colombia) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws upon political history in an attempt to create counter narratives that recognize suppressed histories, communities, and identities. His work has been presented internationally at Tate Modern, London; The New Museum, The SOlomaon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA/PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá; Museu Serralves, Porto; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; San Francisco Art Institute; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and many other public, private and independent spaces.
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist based in New York City and Germantown, New York. His work—which often includes appropriated imagery to examine and recontextualize historical events in black history— is featured in the public collections of such institutions as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Tate, London; among others.
Pedro Reyes (b. 1972, Mexico City) has won international attention for large-scale projects that take existing social problems and imagine impactful solutions that benefit the collective population through the use of sculpture, architecture, video, performance and participation within works that aim to increase individual or collective agency in social, environmental or educational situations. His solo exhibitions include such venues as FACT, Liverpool, United Kingdom; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan; and others. His 2006 Aspen Art Museum exhibition— his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States—Recyclone, addressed consumption, waste, and recycling in our daily lives.
Carey Young (b. 1970, Lusaka, Zambia) incorporates a variety of media such as video, photography, performative events and installation within her artistic practice, to investigate the encroachment of the commercial world on private and public lives and spaces. Beyond her work as a visual artist she is an educator who has taught at the Slade School, the Royal College of Art, as well as the University of East London, among other institutions in the UK, as well as the Bauhaus in Germany, Stockholm University in Sweden, and Harvard University in the U.S. Her work has been featured at the ICA in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Secesssion, Kunstverein Munich, Mass MOCA in Boston, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York.
